tom moody
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"Prophet without honor" award to George A. Romero for his 1973 no-budget movie The Crazies. He lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't have Hollywood smoothies vetting his pictures so he gets to say anything he wants. The premise of this one: plane carrying US government-developed bioweapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The pathogen--an "encephalitic mutation"--causes insanity that either comes on full strength or appears intermittently but eventually results in death, after several days. The bug gets into the town's water supply. The government is late on the scene and the best it can hope to do is declare martial law, round up all the citizens, and contain them in the local high school gym while searching for an antidote or an immune person. The Army, wearing hazmat suits, enters into pitched battles with the locals, crazy and not crazy, many of whom are armed and don't want to be "rounded up."
The main protagonists are a group of sympathetic townspeople, including two firemen who are 'Nam vets, who don't know the full symptoms of the virus or which of them might be infected but attempt to blow town. If they succeed, it means "breaching the perimeter" and spreading the infection to other cities. Suffice it to say, in a packed 90 minutes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the film is nonstop strife and carnage--but funny, too, that's Romero's gift. The main "villain" is the bumbling ineptitude of the Army and the utter callousness of the government towards the townspeople.
What seemed like overwrought science fiction in the '70s has become all too familiar in the '00s with the neglect that led to 9/11, the government's abandonment of New Orleans to chaos, the Washington sniper, anthrax, and the devastation in Iraq. What The Crazies does is wrap all this horror in one explosive package. A movie like this still could never be made in Hollywood--we have to look back 30 years for an unflinching portrait of our own present.